- Homemade
Ice Cream -
- Old
Fashioned Goodness
- by Hope Pryor
 Homemade
ice cream may be old-fashioned, but it will never lose its appeal.
The frozen dairy dessert has delighted both kids and adults for
centuries. We love it so much, July is National Ice Cream Month
in the United States! And what's our favorite flavor? Vanilla,
while chocolate reigns as the favorite topping.
Early ice cream freezers consisted
of a metal container and a wooden tub. The metal container was
filled with the ice cream mixture and then placed inside the
larger wooden tub. Ice was packed in the space around the metal
container and the ice cream was then frozen by shaking the freezer
until the mixture solidified. The development of the hand-cranked
ice cream freezer--which also featured the dasher-- by an American
woman, Nancy Johnson, in 1846, greatly speeded up the process
of making ice cream and is still in use today.
Now a days, if you'd rather not
turn the ice cream by hand, you can opt to use an ice cream freezer
with an electric motor. There's even the option of using a machine
that doesn't require using ice and salt. These types of freezers
operate by being placed inside your refrigerator's freezer compartment,
or are self-contained and have a built-in freezer unit of their
own. One downside to them is that they generally make smaller
portions of ice cream at a time. Great for very small families,
not so great when entertaining family and friends at a backyard
get-together.
There are two basic varieties
of ice cream: those with a cooked custard base and those with
an uncooked base, sometimes referred to as "Philadelphia-style".
I prefer the latter process--although I admit the cooked variety
is creamier in texture-- it's taste that ranks high with me.
Frankly, frozen cooked custard tastes like, well...frozen cooked
custard. It's my personal opinion that cooking the ingredients
undermines the more desirable fresher taste of uncooked cream.
Of course, one can cheat a bit...adding a small amount of instant
pudding mix to an uncooked ice cream base will give the dessert
a creamier texture!
If you have never enjoyed the
taste of true homemade ice cream, then you have been missing
one of life's most enjoyable treats. It's not only the eating
of the ice cream that is memorable, it's the entire process of
having made your very own ice cream, such as who gets to lick
the dasher clean, the eager anticipation for the moment it's
ready to be served, and finally the proud satisfaction that you
made it and it's so much better than any you could ever buy at
the grocery store!
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